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Just got through playing NV's Puzzler. It was pretty cool. Reminded me that there aren't nearly enough Chip's Challenge type of games around these days. With a little bit of work and...er...scrolling animations, it could turn out as something special.

What do you mean by "scrolling animations"? Actual walking animations for the character, or just having things slide smoothly instead of just popping from square to square? The latter would be quite easy to do.

For myself, I've been working for several years on an FPS set in the Warhammer 40k universe. Most of that time has been spent learning C++, Blender, and perseverance. Since I'm mostly a programmer, I've been concentrating on systems, adding a ton of stuff to the Torque Game Engine which I'm using.

Here are a few dodgy old videos. I've made some progress since then, but very little of it is exhibitable. Also note that these were shot for my blog on GarageGames.com, so they're aimed at a technical audience... especially the latter two.

EDIT This project is now changing direction. After GW closing a few fansites, we decided it was too much work to risk them shutting us down; even if they had answered affimitively in the past, we didn't feel like we could trust them. So we're transferring our ideas into our own universe, which actually has a lot more in common with Carnivale, and continuing as planned. /EDIT

Since this is a damnably ambitious project and the team at the moment consists of three people, I've started writing up a design for a little side-project which I'll hopefully complete in 6-8 months, and can take code from to use in the main project. It's really just a diversion, a learning experience, and will hopefully make me a little pocket change .

Here's the quick pitch: cross Left 4 Dead with the procedural level generation from a roguelike, and set it in Alien.

You're a squad from a private military company sent in to investigate a randomly-generated underground Facility which has been taken over by a deadly/terrifying Creature. You've got several objectives, each needing to be completed at different levels underground. I'd really like to make it tense and survival-oriented, as opposed to Left 4 Dead's action orientation. But we'll see how that turns out. And yes, it's kind of like Alien Swarm, but first-person, more hardcore, and again, less action-focused. I really want there to be just one Creature which you'll never really kill... just drive off until next time. There'll be auto-turrets and sentry drones to provide a bit of filler action, but I figure noise will attract the Creature, so finding a way around will always be a good idea.

I'll hopefully be able to post up some screenies for that one in the next few weeks ... once I've actually made more than a design document .

(When I started planning The Facility, I started with a really focused scope. Then as I started taking the concept to its logical conclusion, the ideas mushroomed out into a crazy-awesome roguelike FPS of epicness. Then I remembered that I wanted to actually finish this project, so I ended up trimming out all the fat... into two sequels . PLUS the long-term project What was that about ambition which o'erleaps itself?)

What do you mean by "scrolling animations"? Actual walking animations for the character, or just having things slide smoothly instead of just popping from square to square? The latter would be quite easy to do.

The latter. Watching the screen jump from tile to tile instead of panning smoothly disorients me for some weird reason. It's one of the reasons why I can't play really oldschool DOS RPGs anymore.

While I have little to show at the moment I've been working on building up a soundtrack for a videogame I've had in my head for a few years. An odd starting point probably, but its somewhere. Assets are what is going to take me the longest.

In the mean time, between studying and working I'm slowly building up my skills in Unity, and with a rudimentary understanding of C++, Adobe CS5, Blender, Csound, and SuperCollider, I'm hoping I can patch together enough experience to build, script, and build assets for my games.

My first project, long before I start working on my video game, is make a series of short game-like interactive ... thingies. Demo's maybe? of obscure Science Fiction "moments". something that can be played start to finish in anywhere from 3 to 10 minutes, and with varying degrees of involvement from the player. Could be an interactive movie, or a short FPS level.

My ideas so far:
-A remake of Beta Grove

just the grove and its "lobby", with some scripting and some action that wasn't possible with the original. Just wanted to do my own interpretation and tie in a little twist for the evenutual discovery by the Von Braun, Also its not "imma do a remake of ss1!" and only release the medical deck.)

-the scene from Good Apollo volume one comic in the Amory wars saga.

The one where "god" stops writing his comic because he's pissed about his g/f cheating on him, and ends up hallucinating that his bicycle is a demon that tells him to kill one of his major characters

-A scene from one of the Dune books that I always wished had been made into a worthy movie.

Those are all the ideas i've got. I think in scope they're nice and small and dooable with considerable effort by one person. would be good portfolio pieces.
Also I'm up to suggestions for other good sci-fi moments.

I haven't thought of a name yet for the series. Once I get into the swing of it hopefully I can release a mini-game once every few months.

I like the idea of bite-sized vignettes too. It's a lighter workload and you can put more polish into it and have time to make it into a complete package, and make more of them. But I think it's good for players too. Really good small vignettes are sometimes more memorable because they pack a big punch and don't get watered down by fluff only there to make the game drag on.

I have ideas to make a series too. I was leaning cyberpunk myself. HL2 could work. But if we could get a Dark Mod branch with scifi assets (Doom3 and NeoTokyo), then we get the stealth & AI-searching mechanics, object manipulation, the movement, and a few guns, I'd love it.

Never read this first time around, some pretty cool stuff going on, the most scripting I have ever done is to make a free-roam mod for SanAndreas Multiplayer (Samp).
Also I would hesitantly say that if its under 2 weeks, then posting in a thread isnt resurrecting it.

That looks pretty sweet Renz. Modelling is something I wish I could do well. Not that I've tried and failed (yet) but I have a real lack of knowledge on the subject. I'm still working through the online Blender book.

As for my Sci-fi vignette series, it might not get going until this summer. I just learned some things about Unity that I didn't anticipate, and I've suddenly found it lacking in a few key areas that I'll need. So I'm going to bite the bullet and buy the C4 engine and do it all in there. It's a more powerful engine, written by a professional, with full source code access, and its all in C++, which is a much more familiar place for me. Plus it's inexpensive.

That looks pretty sweet Renz. Modelling is something I wish I could do well. Not that I've tried and failed (yet) but I have a real lack of knowledge on the subject. I'm still working through the online Blender book.

Oh man. Blender isn't bad if you have a good idea of what you're doing, but learning to model with it is like learning to drive a stick shift with lead shoes and boxing gloves on. It won't do anything but frustrate you. You'll get the basics pretty quick, but it just takes...so...damn...long to move your foot over to the clutch.

If you want a smooth experience, get a modeler that won't piss you off by making you do everything the hard way. I usually recommend Silo for anyone starting out. It doesn't do any of the really swanky stuff, but for straight up modeling, it's a hard package to beat. There are people who have moved up to the expensive tools like Max, Modo, XSI, and Maya that still use it to whip together their low poly meshes.

I was under the impression that most modelling and animation pros didn't like Blender very much because the UI was so different from the big name programs. I didn't really know anything else other than that. Of course I also keep hearing about the difficulties of dealing with the open source format too.

It's the UI that makes everything so damn difficult in Blender. All these modelers do the exact same thing when it comes right down to it. At the end of the day, you just sliced, rotated, and moved a bunch polygons, edges, and vertices no matter which one you used.. Some just approach the process more elegantly, and offer up better tools to make your life that much easier.

One of the first things anyone who uses Blender will tell you is to "learn the hotkeys". It's practically their mantra. And why? Because the UI is a weirdly laid out convoluted mess. Even with the huge strides they've made cleaning it all up in the 2.5 beta, it's still pretty damn messy. Some of the things that should be grouped together aren't, and sometimes you can't find things you need to find at all. Until you commit those hotkeys to memory, you won't be doing much of anything at all.

When all is said and done, Blender is a pretty powerful tool, and does a surprisingly good job of keeping pace with the big $1000+ packages. I mean you can't beat it for the price. But it's just a little too clunky, and not at all easy to learn.

Okay, question time for anyone who might know a fairly decent bit about skeletal anatomy.

I'm working on the rib cage at the moment. At first, I thought it would be the easiest part of the skeleton to do. But as it's turning out, it's ending up being the most difficult, because you have to get the shape exactly right for the rest of it to turn out okay. Since I don't have a 3D model to rotate around and look at from every angle, I have to base the work off a few dozen pictures I have to get things right. Everyones skeleton is actually pretty unique as it turns out, so I have to pick a happy medium and go with what looks best.

My question is, does this look right proportionally? Is the rib cage too bowed out? Too shallow? Bits and pieces too far stretched? Is the sternum too big? I can look at my collection pictures for hours, but a bunch of drawings and photos from different models and people can only give you so much information. I don't have a straight top down view, for instance, so alot of this is based off of guesswork.

@Renzatic
To me the proportions look fine, nice work. However you're attaching the ribs incorrectly to the vertebrae. They should not stem from the transverse process (the "spikes") but from the back of the vertebra body. Refer to this, this and this.

You can also refer to Google's Body Browser for an interactive 3D model and checking out your proportions (webgl enabled browsers only).

@Renzatic
To me the proportions look fine, nice work. However you're attaching the ribs incorrectly to the vertebrae. They should not stem from the transverse process (the "spikes") but from the back of the vertebra body. Refer to this, this and this.

Ahh! Okay. That makes alot more sense. I could never tell exactly how the ribs connected to the spine. All the pictures I've seen show a socket on the side of the transverse process, so I made a semi uneducated guess and put them there.

Kinda weird that they'd be somewhat freefloating, though. Everything else I've made thus far, at least on the spine and pelvis, seems to have one cup or extrusion meant to fit into another elsewhere. Oh well. It's easy to fix.

You can also refer to Google's Body Browser for an interactive 3D model and checking out your proportions (webgl enabled browsers only).

You are a king among men. Amazing that after all the google searching I've done, I never came across this site.

My only concern is the cartilage, and how it has to arch upwards so far to meet with the sternum. Most of the pics and models I've seen show it arching only slightly higher than the corresponding rib...which means I'll probably have to redo the sternum at some point.